10/23/2015

Number Insight: Validating and Cleaning Your Contacts

If you have an existing database of phone numbers, and you want to send SMS messages to them, it's easy to import the contact information into Telerivet. But how can you know if the phone numbers you've collected are actually valid, or whether they're mobile numbers capable of receiving SMS?

On the Contacts page, Telerivet now provides a web interface to Nexmo's Number Insight API, which makes it easy to look up information about your contacts' phone numbers, including the type of phone number (mobile, landline, or VOIP), validity, mobile network, and country.

You can use Number Insight to detect invalid numbers, landlines, or VOIP phone lines in your contact list, so you can clean your contact list before sending SMS broadcasts.

Configuring Number Insight

In order to use Number Insight, you'll first need to register your own Nexmo account, so that you can pay Nexmo to use this functionality. (For pricing, see the Number Insight tab on Nexmo's pricing page.)

To configure Number Insight in your Telerivet account, go to your Contacts page and click Actions > Number Insight setup, or follow this link.

Running Number Insight

On your Contacts page, select any contacts to look up, then click Actions > Number Insight. Nexmo's Number Insight API will fill in information about the selected contacts. The process may take some time, depending on the number of contacts selected.

Removing/Blocking Unwanted Phone Numbers

You can use Number Insight to help you remove invalid or unwanted phone numbers from your contact list before sending an SMS broadcast.

After running Number Insight on your contact list, you can use the "Filters" function on the Contacts page to create a filter for unwanted contacts, such as "Number Type is not mobile":

After creating a filter for the contacts you don't want, select all contacts in the filter, then either block the contacts via Actions > Block sending, remove them from a group via Groups... dialog, or permanently delete them via Actions > Delete contacts.